Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [300]
That evening the Gorbachevs gave me dinner in an old mansion, converted many years before for entertaining foreign guests. The atmosphere was, perhaps deliberately, as close to that of Chequers as I ever found in the Soviet Union. In the rooms around which Mr Gorbachev showed us, Churchill, Eden, Stalin and Molotov had smoked, drunk, and argued. We were a small group, the Gorbachevs being joined by just the Ryzhkovs, who did not take a very active part in the conversation. A brightly burning log fire — again like Chequers — illumined the room to which we later withdrew to put right the world’s problems over coffee and liqueurs. I saw two interesting examples of the way in which old Marxist certainties were being challenged. There was a lively argument between the Gorbachevs, which I provoked, about the definition of the ‘working class’ about which we heard so much in Soviet propaganda. I wanted to know how they defined this in the Soviet Union — a point of some substance in a system in which, as the old Polish saying goes, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.’ Mrs Gorbachev thought that anyone who worked, whatever his job or profession, was a worker. Her husband argued initially that only the blue-collar workers counted. But he then reconsidered and said that this was largely an historical or ‘scientific’ (that is Marxist) term which did not do justice to the diversity of today’s society.
The second indication of a break with old socialist certainties was when he told me — with tantalizingly little detail — of plans which were being discussed for increasing people’s incomes and then having them make some payment for public services like health and education. Not surprisingly, such plans, whatever they were, came to nothing.
The following morning I had breakfast with refuseniks at the British Embassy. Theirs was a disturbing tale of heroism under mainly petty but continual persecution. Every obstacle, short of total prohibition, was put in the way of their worship and expression of cultural identity. They were discriminated against at work — if they found work. They told me that giving private tuition was the easiest way to earn a living: for these were educated people whose talents the Soviet state should have been able to draw upon. One of their leaders, Iosif Begun, brought me a tiny Star of David, which he had carved out of horn while he was in prison and which I have always kept.
Later that morning I left Moscow for Tbilisi in Georgia. I had wanted to see a Soviet republic other than Russia and I knew that Georgia would present a great cultural and geographical contrast. This certainly proved to be the case. From all that I saw — and from the excellent and exotic food and Georgian wine — it was clear to me that given the right political and economic conditions this was an area where the tourist industry could flourish. But, as in the detective story, perhaps the most important feature of my admittedly brief visit was the ‘dog which did not bark’. Although I was presented with all the evidence of a vigorous folklore and although I knew how ancient and distinctive Georgia was — only coming under the control of Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century — there was still no evidence of that desire for national self-assertion and independence which was to come.
That night I left Tbilisi Airport for London. It had been, quite simply, the most fascinating and most important foreign visit I had made. I could sense in the four days I spent in the Soviet Union that the ground was shifting underneath the communist system. De Tocqueville’s insight that ‘experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that